Snow Hunters: A Novel (13 page)

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One day, helping Peixe mop the floors of the church, he saw the advertisement for a job delivering newspapers. Waiting at the office, Yohan looked behind him at the boys and the girls waiting as well. They stuffed their hands in their pockets and made faces at him when the hiring man wasn’t looking.

He was given a shorter route than the children. He bought a bicycle. Every morning before dawn he delivered the newspapers. Some mornings when he was finished he climbed the hill and watched the horses. Other times he bicycled along the coastal road, stopping beside the land where the settlement once was and where the plantation house had been renovated and turned into a school, the field used for soccer tournaments that he and Peixe went to on the weekends.

They sat high in the bleachers, Peixe insisting, and they looked out over the field and followed the bright glow of uniforms.

Most of the people who had once lived in the settlement
were gone. He knew that some of the fishermen had formed a village near a small bay but that was all. He did not know where the rest had gone, did not know whether they had stayed as a group or had scattered, moving across this country or even farther, across oceans.

He thought of the blind juggler who tossed hats and shoes. He thought of a boy with an imaginary spyglass, facing the coast. A girl’s lips brushing his ear as she spoke. The touch of a hand against his own.

He hoped that wherever they all were, their lives were how they wished it to be.

A goal was scored. Peixe stood, lifting his cane and shouting, and Yohan joined him.

In this way the days passed. Those days became years. Those years a life. In the evenings he climbed the old stairs into his room. Standing by the window, he pressed a cold washcloth against his neck. A fan spun. He listened to music coming from the nightclub. An airplane. The voice of the woman across the street.

O
ne summer the bell above the shop door rang once and stopped. He had just opened the shop and it was empty. From his worktable he looked up.

He saw a girl with a hand in the air, her fingers closing over the bell, muting the sound. She had a small nose and a pointed chin and her hair was pale and cut short like a boy’s.

She was wearing a pair of sandals and a green dress that ended at her shins. The shoulder straps were thin but sturdy and there were buttons on the ends. He appreciated the simplicity of the design and the simplicity of her
form there by the door, this shadowed pose, that arc of her arm and her on her tiptoes.

He waited for her to say something, to explain herself, but she didn’t. She stood transfixed by the bell. Then she released it and pushed it with her fingertips, causing the ringing once more. Not once did her eyes leave the bell, as if she were waiting for it to fall. She brought both of her hands toward her ears.

—Is it a bother? he finally said.

He spoke in Portuguese.

She shook her head. She pointed out the window. She said the other day she could hear it from the street. She said it sounded new. She liked the way the sound touched her skin.

—Like this, she said, and shook her hands beside her head and made a buzzing noise with her lips.

—Yes, he said, and laughed and she laughed, too.

She had not moved from the door. The light was clear and strong outside and she was still a silhouette. Then she turned toward him and approached and they looked at each other for a moment.

He lowered his head. When he glanced at her she was looking around at the boxes and the tables and the fabrics against the walls and the shirts wrapped in paper. He
noticed a bracelet on her wrist; it was made of colored threads, old, simple, and elegant.

She approached the tailor’s dummy and examined the stitches on its stomach. She looked beyond him toward the curtain. There was a familiarity to her that he could not place.

—You’ve been here long? she said.

She meant the shop. Her voice was quiet, deliberate. She stood beside the tailor’s dummy, facing the window with her hands behind her back. The air was still. Pedestrians walked by and their shadows cut through the shop.

Her short hair was wet. It was the color of the morning and she smelled of the ocean.

He shrugged, even though she could not see him. He did not know if nine years was a long time or not.

She smiled, sliding her fingernails along her forearms.

—It’s nice, she said, and he looked away again at the things she saw and the quiet and the light and he could not help but agree, it was nice at this hour and the many other hours and days; and he felt the pride of that, those words and this shop, and knew that he was blushing although he did not think she noticed, she was now looking up at the ceiling, at the small spider in the air.

Beside the tailor’s dummy stood an umbrella, closed
and leaning against the corner of the room. She picked it up and twirled it once in her hands.

She smiled again.

She said, —I’ll take it back now, and he looked at her, perplexed, and then he felt a weight on his tongue; then his heart.

He sat there, stunned. He was unable to speak, unable to rise from his chair.

She laughed.

—Okay, she said. You keep it for a while longer.

She returned the umbrella to its corner and looked at him once more. She was still smiling. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, studying him, waiting.

—Yohan, she said, and in that moment he heard the remnant of a child’s voice that used to call his name.

Before he could respond she abruptly turned and opened the door, the bell ringing as she returned to the sidewalk.

He rushed outside. He was flooded by the heat and the daylight. He squinted, lifting a hand. But what had driven him slipped away and he stopped. A doubt had entered him. And he grew afraid, although what he was afraid of he was unsure.

He remained by the shop window. A neighbor greeted
him. He spotted the green of her dress against the pale of the buildings and watched as she moved in and out of the crowd and the sunlight. He followed the curve of her bare shoulders. The beat of her sandals on the cobblestone. Then she was gone.

•  •  •

He began to look for her but did not know where to begin, searching the town for someone he had not seen in five years. In some ways he did not know whom to look for, his mind returning to the girl she was. He visited Peixe in case he had seen her but the groundskeeper mentioned nothing and Yohan said nothing either, keeping her arrival within him.

It seemed possible that he had been wrong, that there had been some kind of misunderstanding in the words she had said in the shop, that it was not her voice he had heard, that it was someone else.

Then a few days later the bell rang, the door opened, and she stood in the same place as she did the first time. She kept silent and from his worktable he watched her.

—Okay, she said, worrying her fingers as if she wanted to say something else or was waiting for him to say something.

She looked around at the shop as she did before and hurried out the door.

She did not visit again until the next day. This time she stayed. She was wearing her green dress and her sandals and she remained standing at a distance from him. She had combed her short hair. She fiddled with her bracelet and he wondered if she had woven it or had purchased it or whether someone had given it to her. Her movements in the shop were awkward, as though she was no longer used to small spaces. He brought her tea.

That first week Bia never stayed long, her visits still unexpected. He never knew what to say when she came. He waited for her to tell him where she was staying but she didn’t. He waited for her to tell him what her life had been like these past five years.

When he asked where she had been she replied, —All over, and said nothing else.

It had always been like this. The hour passed in the only way they knew how. But now, in their reticence and their shyness, they were remembering each other. As if they were each a lens to hold and peer into.

In this way an ease began to form around them.

—I’ll see you soon, she always said, whenever they parted.

He was never sure if he would see her the following the day or the week after or whether this was the last time.

But she continued to come. Sometimes she visited in the mornings. Other times in the afternoons and there were also times when she waited outside until he noticed her in the window, leaning against Kiyoshi’s bicycle, which she had kept all these years.

She was twenty-four now. And every day she sat where Kiyoshi once did, curled on the chair and drinking tea. If he had clothes to tailor, she let him work and watched the passing pedestrians.

And although there were days when she seemed to be how he remembered her, she had become more confident and assured, he heard it when she spoke, that change in her voice now that she was older. When customers entered she greeted them, complimenting the women on the dresses they wore or the men on their suits, and they looked at her with curiosity, wondering who she was.

They only ever saw each other in the shop. She shut her eyes against the sunlight, tilting her head to one side as she often did, a gesture he would grow accustomed to and then expect, and then love her for it, her body moving as though some part of her he had not yet seen was suddenly revealed.

But there were also times when he was unable to move, unable to look at her, afraid he had been imagining this and that she wouldn’t be there. It seemed possible. And when he considered this an emptiness overwhelmed him, as if he were no longer here, that there was just this shell of a body bent over a table. And even as he continued to hear her behind him he felt a sadness, though for what he could not say. It seemed to have nothing to do with her at all but rather a fragment of some old thought.

But she was there of course, she had not left. She stood by the far wall, holding her elbows and browsing the shelves as though she had entered a library.

•  •  •

Once, as he was hemming a pair of trousers, he heard her rummaging in the closet. Then it was silent and when he looked toward the back of the shop she was gone.

She emerged from the kitchen a few minutes later, through the curtain, wearing a suit. It was gray, one Kiyoshi had made for him. She wore a hat with a short brim and it fell past her eyes. A dark blue necktie hung around her neck.

—Help, she said.

The jacket was large for her, its shoulders too wide, but he spun her around, admiring her. Holding her, he walked her toward the window and she stood there looking out, the hat tilted on her head. The passersby paused, waiting to see if she would move.

She didn’t. She stayed there frozen in a pose. Later, she changed into a dress Yohan had made and returned to the window. The neighborhood children gathered on the street and waved their arms to distract her. Every so often she winked at them or leaned forward and shouted, —Boo! and they scattered in mock terror.

She began to assist him. She came early, bringing fruit and cookies, and rushed across the room to make coffee, her bare feet light over the floor. She accompanied him on his deliveries, waiting on the sidewalk as he entered a building.

At the shop she wrapped the tailored clothes and dusted the shelves, following the perimeter of the room. She stood by Yohan’s side with a notebook while he measured a man for a suit.

When the shop was closed they spent hours listening to the radio, tuning in to a station that played French songs, Bia tapping her feet and mumbling along, practicing the language. Or they listened to the news, the murmur
of a man’s voice filling the room as he spoke of the cities, other countries.

Each day for an hour in the afternoon she sat in front of Kiyoshi’s sewing machine and Yohan would peer over her shoulder as she chewed on her tongue and practiced stitches on the spare pieces of fabric he had given her.

He wondered what Kiyoshi would have thought of her there at his worktable. It had never occurred to him until recently that he had been the tailor’s first and only apprentice. And to this day he did not know why the man had taken him, did not know whether Kiyoshi had volunteered or whether he had accepted a proposal that had been offered.

In that first year he woke one night to Kiyoshi shaking him, unaware that in his sleep he had been screaming. He was unable to focus; his eyes had lost clarity. His clothes were wet. Kiyoshi took him into his arms and lifted him. He drew water for a bath and brought the shop’s footstool and sat beside the tub, pouring the warm water over Yohan and scrubbing his back. He had sat in the water hugging his knees, unwilling to let go of Kiyoshi’s hand.

He wondered if his life now would seem as far away as so many of the years did. It seemed impossible to him,
watching her hunched over the table in her green dress, sewing.

One day she brought him a roll of fabric, carrying it on her shoulder. Yohan held the door open as she pushed through the entrance, her body damp with sweat.

—They were just throwing it away, she said. At the textile factory. It is new, no? The building. There’s more if you want. I could only carry one. Good stuff, no?

She wiped her face with her forearms. She slapped the fabric and dust burst over her and she shrieked and Yohan, laughing, ran into the kitchen, soaking a hand towel under the faucet.

When he returned she was sitting down. Standing above her, he wiped the dust from her skin. He started with her face and then moved the towel over her shoulders and her hands.

They did not speak. He felt her watching him. Her fingers were calloused. Dirt was buried under her fingernails. He flattened her palms. With his index finger he followed the lines on her skin. She tilted her head and let him.

Later that day he shut his eyes, enjoying the sun in the room. A shadow passed. He heard movement but kept his eyes closed. Slowly, she slipped her hand through his
hair. She traced the outline of his crooked nose and the scar. She placed her lips against his eyelid. Then, releasing him, she moved to his other eye. The gesture was light, almost hesitant. He felt her breath on his forehead.